Adherents.com: Religious Groups in Literature

34,420 citations from literature (mostly science fiction and fantasy) referring to real churches, religious groups, tribes, etc. [This database is for literary research only. It is not intended as a source of information about religion.]

Viking, continued...

"An hour later the submarine was deep in the Sea of Valusia. George, Joe, and Hagbard stood on the bridge, Hagbard leaning against the ancient Viking prow... " [Other refs. not in DB. A ship used prominently in the book is called the Leif Erikson.]

Pg. 90-91: "'My father's house has many mansions, Chris,' he said. 'For instance, you'll find, in the hereafter, the particular heaven of each theology.'

'Which is right then?' I asked, completely baffled now.

'All of them,' he said, 'and none. Buddhist, Hindu, Moslem, Christian, Jew--each has an after-life experience which reflects his own beliefs. The Viking has his Valhalla, the American Indian his Happy Hunting Ground, the zealot his City of Gold. All are real. Each is a portion of the overall reality.' "

Viking

world

1978

Tucker, Wilson. The Year of the Quiet Sun. New York: Ace (1970); pg. 51.

"'Haakon? Who is Haakon?'

'A latter-day Viking; he was born too late. Haakon wrote Pax Abrahamitica, a history of the desert tribes...' "

"Uncle Freddy had a Viking's funeral. His coffin was placed in an old motorboat, one of those polished wooden things... It had been filled with various flammable stuff and moored out in the cenre of the lake... "

"They looked on it as he might have regarded a Viking saga; often he had to remind himself that he was midway in time between [now] and the first ships to cross the western ocean. " [Also pg. 131.]

Viking

world

2030

Jablokov, Alexander. Nimbus. New York: Avon Books (1993); pg. 206.

"The gangs... fought a continual vicious urban war, putting them in great demand worldwide as urban assault troops, much as Vikings had been hired everywhere in the Middle Ages. "

Viking

world

2040

Bova, Ben. Moonrise. New York: Avon Books (1996); pg. 374.

"...Alan Johansen... He also inherited their good looks: Johansen had the chiseled blond features of a Nordic warrior of old, although his slim, almost delicate build was more like that of a dancer than a Viking. "

"'Damn atavistic cacafogo. Ought to mount a set of ox horns on his helmet and wrap his iron ass in a bearskin jockstrap.'

Stein smiled in spite of himself. In his favorite fantasies he did imagine himself a Viking. Or, since he had both Norse and Swedish genes, perhaps a Varangian marauder slashing his way southward into ancient Russia. How wonderful it would be to answer insults with an axe or a sword, unfettered by the stupid constraints of civilization! To let the red anger flow as it was meant to, powering his great muscles for battle! To take strong blonde women who would first fight him off, then yield with sweet openness! He was born for a life like that. "

"She made an unobtrusive gesture toward an adjoining table, where a great blond man in a Viking outfit drank beer with a saturnine, well-used wayfarer in floppy seaboats and a ruffled black shirt... The Viking and the pirate stared in mild surprise... " [More, pg. 77-79, 102, 130, 143.]

"The Hermians, it was often joked, sometimes behaved as if the Sun were their personal property. They were bound to it in an intimate love-hate relationship--as the Vikings had once been linked to the sea, the Nepalese to the Himalayas, the Eskimos to the tundra. "

"Constantine shrugged. 'Did you really believe that we could share the Empire forever? If the Armenian Christians appeal to me, I will help them, and if the Visigoths attack Thrace, I will repel them...' " [Also pg. 324, 340.]

Book jacket: "In an unremembered past of savagery, magic, and miracles, one figure blazed like a fiery comet across the blood-soaked fields of Europe and North Africa--a fierce combatant and brilliant strategist named Ash, unequalled in battle, who vanished into the mists of a history long forgotten, until now.

The armies of the Visigoth Empire have smashed the might of Europe, plunging the conquered lands into unnatural night. Only Burgundy fights on, battered but unbeaten, still warm in the embrace of the sun... "

...this note is intended to bring the reader up to date with the two previous volumes... The fifteenth-century mercenary captain, Ash, has discovered that the North African Visigoth invasion of Europe is being led by a slave general who is her twin. Ash also learns that her 'saint's voice' guiding her in battle is, in fact, the voice of the Visigothic machina rei militaris... transmitted overseas from Carthage... Charles, Duke of Burgundy, first insists on giving battle to the invading Visigoth army. At Auxonne, the Visigoths field golem and Greek Fire weapons; Duke Charles is injured; and during the confusion Ash is separated from the company, captured, and sent as a prisoner to the capital of the Visigoth Empire, Carthage. "

Visigoth

world

1476 C.E.

Gentle, Mary. Lost Burgundy. New York: HarperCollins (2000); pg. v.

[Note to the Reader] "Ash, a fifteenth-century mercenary captain, is inextricably caught up in the Visigoth invasion of Europe from North Africa. She has discovered that her 'saint's voice,' the Lion who guides her in battle, is in fact the transmission of the Visigoth machina rei militaris or 'tactical computer.' Ash's twin--the Visigoth general called the Faris--was bread to hear the machina at a distance, and Ash has discovered that she was discarded from the same experiment. " [Extensive Visigoth refs. throughout book, not in DB.]

Pg. 223: "'Voodoo Chile' came on and I put my soldering iron and closed my eyes... I was listening to the silence between the notes, the long, lonely distance between the guitar and organ. "; Pg. 282: Title of chapter 8 is "Voodoo Child (Slight Return) "

"'The opposite of what this other bunch, these Brazilian voodoo people, are saying...' "

Vodoun

California: Los Angeles

1996

Powers, Tim. Expiration Date. New York: Tor (1996); pg. 96.

"'...You must know as well as I do that your methods have no place in a modern hospital. Voodoo dolls! Ouija boards! And how many of these candles you have got on your shelves in there... Your office smells like a church, and looks like some kind of ignorant Mexican fortuneteller's tent!'

...In an even voice she said, 'These methods are no more--'

'Voodoo dolls, Dr. Elizalde! I can't believe you credit such--'

'I don't credit them, any more than I credit Rorschach blots as really being pictures of monsters!... By having patients do readings...' "

"'But he's not a Moslem himself, is he? There's nothing about that in his description.'

'He's not a Moslem,' Albigoni said. 'Doesn't believe in any formal religion as far as I know. Dabbled in vodoun a few years ago but not seriously. Used to visit a shop in LA for ritual items, more for research than spiritual need, I think.' "

She paused momentarily in the path. 'Look, Brother--if we didn't honor their religion, their missionaries would be push-hooked, and then their government might decide no to expend god resources maintaining an alien squatter-colony. We need Nath equipment and material and kowhow and communicatinos, and if we don't get them we'll--well, can you imagine scrounging a living from this terrain, alone?' She gestured up and down the slope, taking in the lava and ice. 'So we follow their religion. They don't demand that of us, but we really have to.'

As the Blacks and Reds of Latin America had to follow Christianity, overtly. Now it was coming clear. 'So you merged your Saints with their Spirits, so that they would believe you were honoring their religion?'

'That's correct. It was easy, in four sections of the Wheel. Their God of Gas, Xe Kwi Stofr, is our Saint Christopher, and...' "

Pg. 632: "'Surely, the Gran Houmfort is a museum. Obviously you have not visited the wing devoted to O'Haitian culture. You have never heard of the great vodus of O'Haiti, of O'Earth. You have never heard of Gbo, great vodu of war, of Heviyoso, vodu of storm, of Legba, vodu of fertility. And you have never heard of Dangbe, vodu lord, king of all.

'Phillipe, you do not know that in O'Haiti the houmfort was the shrine of the vodus. You never heard of the rites of vodu, the sacrifice of the black rooster, the ouanga bag, the danse calinda, the zombie?' "; Pg. 659: "'--vodu was a mix from the start, and we can use the same tactic as the O'Haitians to make vodu live again, serve again as the tool and focus of our national struggle against descendants of the Christian slavers.' " [More, pg. 632-633, 658-659, 673-674, 701, etc. N'Haiti and N'Alabama are the main colony worlds featured in the story.]

Overcooked and still broiling, Keller connected with him on a personal level while in their periphery the grave ship hovered its silent threat of Challenger's flank.

'I can practice some voodoo.' ";

Pg. 325: "Two of the Anointed stepped in front of Keller, braced against Riutta's strong presence. She was a mighty survivor, but the zombies were unimpressed. Being dead awhile could do that. " [No other refs. to 'voodoo' by name, but a significant section here reflects voodoo/zombie themes.]

"'Craig, my old friend, I value and esteem you, but if you're going to hop out with the news that we're going to turn into a bunch of psi-powered spacehounds, well, you've been studying that voodoo craziness too long.' "

Pg. 25: "'...I'm the Reverend Fuse Tender Sixth Class Tembo... since we're shipmates, Bill, please call me Tembo, and how is the condition of your soul?' "; Pg. 26: "'There was no death in the SOUTH! And why was the South spared, I ask you, and the answer is because it was the will of Samedi that all the false prophets an false religions and false gods be wiped from the face of the Earth so that the only true faith should remain. The First Reformed Voodoo Church . . .' "; Pg. 29: "'Hell awaits you, my boy, unless you are saved. Turn your back on your superstitious ways, for the First Reformed Voodoo Church welcomes you with open arms; come unto her bosom, and find your place in heaven at Samedi's right hand. Sit there with Mondongue and Bakalou and Zandor, who will welcome you.' " [Tembo is one of the major characters in this section of the novel. Some other refs., not in DB, although the author's Voodoo church is a satirical spin on Southern Baptists.]

Vodoun

Georgia: Atlanta

2065

Bishop, Michael. Catacomb Years. New York: Berkley (1979); pg. 210.

"At the beginning of the Sixties, in fact, Saganella Lesser found them a more deeply entrenched irritant than such underground religious sects as the Mythodists, the American Hoodoo Criers, and the Piscapalians of Dagon Magus, none of which had the effrontery to be legitimate scions of the Urban Charter. "

"The German-speaking Jews who had worked on modern physics in the beginning of the twentieth century were nowhere mentioned. Indeed, modern physics, with all its technological wonders and horrors, got rather short shrift. Clearly the regime was still of two minds about this wild, uncontrollable, and yet powerful tool. It had been derided as Jewish voodoo science in the beginning of the twentieth century, but the nuclear weapons it had produced were all too enthusiastically used in the middle. "

Vodoun

Germany

2096

Sterling, Bruce. Holy Fire. New York: Doubleday (1988); pg. 106.

"Fur den Korper [Für den Körper] for the body: eu essentielle, le parfum. The perfume was voodoo. She happened to sample a traditional Parisian scent that Mia had once used on a special night sixty years ago. The evocative reek struck her such a blow of rapturous deja vu that she dropped her bag and almost fell down the street. Elixier des lebens! "

"Louison was in the unhappy Afro-Caribbean tradition of ruler-patriarchs with heavy voodoo. Guys who were all Papa Docs and Steppin' Razors and Whippin Sticks. Looking up the hill, Laura had a sudden clear mental image of old Louison. Skinny, yellow-nailed geezer, tottering sleepless through the fort's torchlit dungeons... "

The driver shrugged in a particularly gallic manner, illustrating again the cultural ties Haiti had to the country from which she'd been politically independent for nearly two hundred years. 'She is a loa, the wife of Baron Samedi.'

'Baron Samedi?'

'A most powerful loa. He is lord and guardian of the cemetery. The keeper of the crossroads.'

'What's a loa?'

He frowned, shrugged almost angrily. 'A loa is a spirit, a part of God, very powerful and divine.'

"...tugged at his arm as he passed by, and as she touched him, he stopped, turned, and fixed her with his gaze.

Chrysalis felt as if a slice of night had stabbed into her heart.... She couldn't look away from his eyes.

They were open. They moved, they shifted focus, they even blinked... but they did not see. The face from which they peered was scarcely less skeletal than her own. The brown ridges, eye sockets, cheekbones, jaw, and chin stood out in minute detail, as if there were no flesh between the bone and the taut black skin that covered them...

Chrysalis stared at his back for a moment, shivering, despite the warmth of the evening. She had just seen, talked to, and even touched, she realized, a zombi... She had never been so afraid in her life... "

Pg. 88: "Let them think it voudoun if they preferred, and let them think the science that had resurrected her voudoun as well. "; Pg. 106: "Dancing Spirits: Rhythms and Rituals of Haitian Vodun, the Rada Rite by Gerdes Fleurant " [Extensive other refs., e.g. pg. 94, 97, 104-106, etc.]

"...the vid almost immediately resumed with a flatscan cartoon of the adventures of a skullfaced man in long pants, black coat and tails. Mary recognized Baron Samedi, Gege Nago, the trickster loa of death and cemeteries.

Baron Samedi leaped into a river to go Under the Water, sou dleau, to the land of the dead and the gods of old Haiti. Colonel Sir had used vodoun to his advantage--as had many other rulers on the island before him--and then had slowly converted the countless loa into comic book and cartoon heroes, defusing the faith's power for younger generations. Under the Water, Baron Samedi conversed with Erzulie, the beautiful loa of love, and with Damballa, a rainbow-colored snake. "

"But the cadaver twitched in the shattered glass and fluid. It rose slowly on its arms, shot out one wrinkled knee and foot and stood. It wore a ragged pair of cutoff shorts and sandals. Madame Roach moaned and shrieked. The cadaver mumbled but could say nothing intelligible. It looked around with blind eyes and lurched toward the wall of drums. Martin and Carol sidled quickly into another aisle to let it pass.

The cadaver picked out a smaller drum and pulled it from the wall with a twang of broken wires. It kneeled down on the floor and beat the skin heavily with dead fingers. At each beat the shelves and walls of the shop sucked inward... " [Other refs. to Vodoun, most not in DB. Extensive references to Vodoun pg. 323 to 347.]

'The King's funeral.' Now the voice broke into singsong gibberish. Madame Roach danced lightly between the aisles, upsetting shelves and tumbling the shop's goods to the floor. Clay pots broke and vapors rose, noxious and cloying. She whirled and stumbled beside Carol and Martin, steadied herself and shot her hand out to grab his chin. Regarding him with wide, colorless eyes, she said, still using the child's voice, 'We send the King to the Land Under the Sea, sou dleau. Then we dance.'

'Which King is that?' Martin asked.

'King of the Hill. King of the Road.'

'Take us to the funeral, then,' Martin said.

'It is everywhere. Now. The horse is tired of talking.' She tripped away, toppling more shelves. She knocked against the large jar containing the cadaver. The jar wobbled on its low base, tipped one way and another and fell over, shattering to the floor. "

"'As chaos contained the possibility of matter, so this creature contains the possibility of mind, like a fifth limb latent in man, structured to make and manipulate meaning as the fist is structured to grasp and finger matter.'

The pret' savan--advisor on church matters to the town's official houngan--barely reached Mary's shoulders in height. His intense eyes followed Mary with a look of mild shock and perhaps a little awe. He seemed to recognize her and shook her head, deeply perplexed, as he followed them down the middle aisle between pews to a double altar--stripped pillar beside life size crucifix--at the front of the church.

The crucifix looked ancient, a dark wooden T supporting a black Jesus in muscle knotted agony. Bright blood from the crown of thorns stood out against the ebony black of the face; around the base of the cross twined a vivid green serpent, black tongue frozen in a sinister dart. " [More, pg. 374-378.]

"'Archangels. Loa of the New Pantheon,' Soulavier said. 'I went to this church as a boy, when it was new. John D'Arqueville wished to reunite the best elements of African religion and catholic christianity, to reshape Vodoun. His vision did not spread far from Terrier Noir, however. This church is unique.'

'Do they have names?' Mary asked.

Soulavier looked up, squinting as if digging deep into childhood memory. 'The tall one with the black sword and the feather torch, that is Asambo-Oriel. The first part of the name means nothing, I think; D'Arqueville heard their names in a dream. Asambo-Oriel drove the blacks out of Guinee through the Coast of Souls. He is the Loa with Torch and Sword, like the archangel Uriel. The one with the drum and the bones of birds, that is Rohar-Israfel, Loa of Sacred Music and Chanting. Next is Ti-Gabriel, who calls an end to all loa . . . The smallest of them, and the most mighty. Samedi-Azrael, the most vain, calls us to our graves...' "

"Cracks and gas: that suggested a gruesome analogy. The bocor, or witch doctor, of Haiti (and could the similarity of that name to 'hate' be coincidental? Hate-Haiti--but his mind was drifting...) was said to ride his horse backward to his victim's shack, such out the victim's soul through a crack in the door, and bottle that gaseous soul. Later, when the victim died, the bocor opened the grave, brought out the bottle, and gave the dead man a single sniff of his own soul. Only one sniff: not enough to infuse the entire soul, just part of it. That animated the corpse; it rose up as a zombie, forced to obey the will of the witch doctor. Could the same be done with a human aura...? "

It had been awhile since I'd visited with Mama Julie and Papa Joe or any of the others, and the hounfor wasn't that far away, but I didn't know how they'd take me bringing a Vegan around. They'd never objected when I'd brought people, of course.

'Well . . .' I began.

'I just want to watch,' he said. 'I'll stay out of the way. They'll hardly know I'm there.'

I mumbled a bit and finally gave in. I knew Mama Julie pretty well an I didn't see any real harm being done, no matter what.

So, 'Okay,' said I, 'I'll take you to one. Tonight, if you like.'

...When Myshtigo returned, Dos Santos was at his side.

'What is this about you taking Mister Myshtigo to a pagan ceremony?' he asked... "

Vodoun

Haiti

2200

Zelazny, Roger. This Immortal. New York: Ace Books (1966); pg. 34.

"Various Christian saints peered from behind unfathomable expressions at the bright hearts and cocks and graveyard crosses, flags, machetes and crossroads that clung to almost every inch of the walls about them--frozen into an afte-the-hurricane surrealism by the amphoteric paints of Titan--and whether or not the saint approved one could never tell: they stared down through their cheap picture-frames as though they were windows into an alien world.

The small altar bore numerous bottles of alcoholic beverages, gourds, sacred vessels for the spirits of the loa, charms, pipes, flags, depth photos of unknown persons and, among other things, a pack of cigarettes for Papa Legba.

A service was in progress when we were led in by a young hounsi named Luis... " [Much more material about vodoun not in DB, pg. 34-38, and some elsewhere, as on pg. 43.]

We are always striving to increase the accuracy and usefulness of our website. We are happy to hear from you. Please submit questions, suggestions, comments, corrections, etc. to: webmaster@adherents.com.